Business development isn't urgent

One of my clients has a little problem. Their core market, the one that generates about 40% of their revenue, is going to disappear. They don't know exactly when, but they know how, and they know that within 3 years, it's going to go away. At the very least, they need to replace this revenue. And to their credit, they're getting started now. This seems really simple, and I guess it is, but it's amazing how many services firms screw this up when they're contemplating business development.

Seth Godin posted a terrific article about this in his blog a few days ago. It's here: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/08/hurry.html His point is that most urgen problems aren't surprises. There are exceptions -- being hit by a bus as you step off a curb isn't something you can foresee, but typically, what happens is that you let something important fester until it's a crisis, then you are forced to deal with it. You do a rushed, sometimes sloppy job, but you're let off the emotional hook because you can abdicate responsibility to the urgency of the situation. Steven Covey has written about this -- the first of the seven habits of productive people is proactivity -- addressing things before they become a crisis. I'm as guilty of this as anyone -- maybe more so -- which may be why I'm so sensitive about it. And the worst clients I ever work with are invariably those who apply this bad habit to business development. You wait until you're really backed into a corner to think about business development, and then you have to get clients in 90 days, which is impossible. A client relationship that really went south this year was about exactly this: an ad agency wanted clients immediately, and stupidly, I allowed them to define the scope of the project this way. It didn't work, which I should have seen coming, because it couldn't work, because developing business when it's a crisis is like doing your taxes while sitting in the grass next to a runway at O'Hare. To extend the metaphor, to do business development properly, you need to have a nice, long runway. And if you don't, it's always almost your own doing.